Clan Lindsay

History

The Lindsays trace their Scottish beginnings to two brothers, Walter and William de Lindsay, sons of a Norman lord of Bocquencé. Tradition holds they travelled north in the household of Prince David, later King David I, in the early twelfth century. William was granted lands at Crawford in upper Clydesdale, and it is from this estate that the family's chiefly title, Earl of Crawford, eventually took its name. The surname itself is generally traced to Lindsey in Lincolnshire.

By the fourteenth century the Lindsays were established among Scotland's leading baronial families. A David Lindsay's seal was attached to the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, the letter sent to Pope John XXII asserting Scottish independence. Later in that century, another David Lindsay built a formidable reputation as a knight, and in 1398 he was created Earl of Crawford, one of the oldest and most senior earldoms in the Scottish peerage.

The earldom brought power, and power brought conflict. The 4th Earl, known as 'the Tiger', allied himself with the Black Douglases against the crown, and in 1452 his forces were defeated at the Battle of Brechin by the Gordons and Ogilvys. He was attainted for treason but later pardoned, a pattern of high ambition and reversal that recurs through the family's history over the following two centuries.

Lindsay influence spread across Angus and Fife through several branches. The family acquired the estate of Edzell by marriage in 1358, and it passed in the mid-1400s to a younger son of the 3rd Earl, founding the Lindsays of Edzell; the castle there, with its notable walled garden added in 1604, remained a Lindsay house until it was sold in 1715. Another branch produced Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, poet, playwright and Lyon King of Arms under James V, whose satirical verse is still counted among the best-known literature of the Scottish Reformation period.

A further branch grew from Balcarres in Fife. John Lindsay, a younger son of the 9th Earl of Crawford, built Balcarres House in 1595, and his descendants were created Earls of Balcarres in 1651 for service to the Stuart cause during the civil wars. When the senior Crawford line eventually failed in the nineteenth century, the earldom of Crawford passed to the Balcarres branch, uniting the two titles in one family.

That union holds today. The current chief carries both titles, Earl of Crawford and Earl of Balcarres, and the family still resides at Balcarres House near Colinsburgh. The Clan Lindsay Society was founded in Edinburgh in 1897 to bring Lindsays together across the world, and continues that work. Lindsay is generally described as a Lowland and Border family rather than a Highland clan in the older sense, though it holds full standing among Scotland's chiefly houses.